Steve Lopez

Columnist

Steve Lopez is a California native who has been an L.A. Times columnist since 2001. He has won more than a dozen national journalism awards for his reporting and column writing at seven newspapers and four news magazines, and is a two-time Pulitzer finalist for commentary – in 2012, for his columns on elder care, and in 2016, for his columns on income inequality in California. He is the author of three novels, two collections of columns and a non-fiction work called “The Soloist,” which was a Los Angeles Times and New York Times best-seller, winner of the PEN USA Literary Award for Non-Fiction, and the subject of a Dream Works movie by the same name. Lopez’s television reporting for public station KCET has won three local news Emmys, three Golden Mike awards and a share of the Columbia University DuPont Award.

Recent Articles

I had never stood directly on top of the San Andreas fault. Not to my knowledge, anyway, but as a California native, I’ve probably stumbled over it a time or two. So I jumped at the chance to tour the fault with geophysicist Lucy Jones, the queen of quakes and go-to authority on why the ground...

A man wrapped in a blanket followed me down an alley in Venice Tuesday at 4:30 a.m. I said good morning; he didn’t respond. I was on my way to the home of Nikoletta Skarlatos to talk to her about living in the center of a homeless encampment. She had asked me to arrive pre-dawn, because she had...

The first response arrived in February, from Cal State Bakersfield. “It’s a good feeling when you open a letter and it says, ‘Congratulations,’” says Noe Martinon. It was the first of many. Next, Martinon got accepted to Cal State Fullerton, and that was followed by great news from UC Irvine. Not...

I went to Los Angeles International Airport on Monday morning, like I have on so many occasions, but this was an entirely different experience. I didn’t have to deal with the usual crush of airport traffic, or people, or security headaches. I navigated around all that madness and I breezed because...

Elvira Evers recalls the mayhem on the street and the rising fear that she and her daughter — who clung to her — were in danger. Lionela, almost 6 at the time, remembers people running by with liquor and furniture looted from stores along Long Beach Boulevard in Compton. It was midafternoon on...

The 4300 block of Degnan Boulevard in Leimert Park has a look of faded glory, with its shuttered storefronts and stalled promise. Like so many parts of South Los Angeles, this is not what anyone would have hoped for when, a quarter of a century ago, the uprising in the Rodney King cop-acquittal...

One day in the locker room I overheard an Asian gent tell someone he learned English by listening to the radio as a kid. Namely, he tuned in to the late Chick Hearn calling Laker games and Vin Scully calling Dodger games. “Where I grew up, I could only get certain stations,” he said, and the signals...